You owe it to yourself to give your new business venture a fighting chance, and unfortunately, that means getting it right from the get-go. While you can always change and adapt later, you do need a solid foundation. If you try to launch without marketing in advance, you’re just yet another business calling out to the void. You owe it to yourself and to those who believe in you to put in the time and effort of building up launch hype and establishing points of contact before you get started.
There are so many great ways to help you launch a new business, but ultimately it will boil down to marketing. Marketing in one way or another, is essential, but you don’t need to go at it alone.
Use this guide and take on the helpful tips to help you successfully plan, manage, and launch your new business with a bang:
Hiring Marketing Professionals
It doesn’t matter how large your startup investment was. Hiring great, talented people for the job is just step one. Actually managing to bring them together so that they work as an effective team is another. You need to not only have the direction and drive, but the vision to see things through. If you don’t have that experience, and haven’t ever worked within the C-suite, then this can a major challenge.
For smaller businesses, hiring anyone at all can be a struggle. You have minimal investment cost, and likely won’t be able to pay for a team for a while yet. While friends and family can help, they won’t necessarily be experts either. You need effectiveness, not manpower, which can stop many small businesses from launching successfully.
The answer to both these issues is to look for a part-time option. Outsourcing your marketing needs to an agency can help take the load off your shoulders and helps you minimize your overall cost, since you only hire those specialists while you need them, or while you can afford them.
Businesses that have a large upstart investment, on the other hand, don’t necessarily need manpower. They need direction. That’s when you should hire a fractional CMO, or chief marketing officer. These CMOs are like freelancers and only work for short periods of time. A C-suite marketing executive can help pull together your team and focus your marketing efforts and campaigns to a needlepoint. You can hire such a freelancer just for when you get started, or you can bring them on periodically throughout the years to ensure your team is kept sharp as a tack.
Both options let you save massive amounts of money by only hiring people for the job you need, when you need it. If you’re confident you can handle the rest of your needs in-house, do it. Only when you need that professional experience full-time should you start to look at hiring a full team or looking to fill in that specific position. Until then, outsource. It’s a great way to get top talent for less overall.
Work with a Business Consultant
The reason why you need marketing professionals on your team from the jump is so that you can then start building up hype and conducting essential market research. Both those tasks can help you launch your new business with a bang, but if the business itself isn’t properly managed and set up it will all fall down like a house of cards.
That’s why, unless you’re a business management expert and know exactly what you are doing, it’s a good idea to bring on a business consultant team in the early days. This professional or team can help create management strategies from how you’ll get the work down to even the tools you’ll use to accomplish it.
There are many different kinds, so choose the one that suits your values. If you’re launching a sustainable business, for example, finding sustainable business consultants is a must.
Think of hiring these consultants as you double-checking your approach. Yes, you will have ideas, but those that have worked to either fix, start, or restructure companies are going to have a larger collection of experience and examples to draw from. You need your business to stand on its own two feet, which means having someone from the outside checking on your business model and framework is a must if you want any hope to succeed.
Use PR Effectively
Your business solves a problem, so if you want your business to become a trusted solution you yourself need to establish yourself as a key figure in the field. A good way to do this is through PR marketing. Get involved in key conversations in your industry. If you can put out some very useful, and very important discourse ahead of your business launch you can ramp up the credibility you’ll need to then sell your business to other key players in your field.
Once you launch you’ll need to continue these efforts. Try to get reporters talking about your business, or, at the very least, you. If they talk about you and your ideas, chances are the journalist in question will refer to your business in the process. This is great for SEO, and how you can really establish both yours and your business’ name in your industry.
Work with Local Influencers
Word-of-mouth marketing is, by far, the most effective way to sell anything. It’s also the most notoriously difficult. How you go about it will matter. Say, for instance, you are creating a game. If you get in touch with local gamers and influencers who are popular in the genre you’re working in, you can do a lot for your marketing and business efforts. Start first by inviting these key players to beta test. Let them talk about the game in question, and even what they didn’t like. Why? Because when it comes to early releases the most important thing that customers want to hear is that the company heard the issues and fixed them.
That way you can get the conversation started, stir up some interest, and use the feedback to improve your product. Closer to actual launch you can invite those gamers or influencers back to see the almost-ready-to-launch product.
This is just one way you can work with influencers – but do remember that vetting is important. You need to understand the influencer, their niche, and their audience so that you can establish a thriving partnership.
